Pentagon puts Iran war cost at $25bn

The Pentagon has put the US bill for the war against Iran at at least $25bn after roughly two months of fighting, as defense secretary Pete Hegseth faced lawmakers on Capitol Hill this week. According to The Guardian, the figure was given to the House armed services committee by the department’s chief financial official, Jules Hurst III, who said costs were rising and were driven largely by munitions, operations and maintenance, and replacing equipment. The hearing came as President Donald Trump signaled he is prepared to keep Iran under a naval blockade until a deal is reached, a posture that turns a short air-and-sea campaign into an open-ended budget line.

Hegseth used the appearance to argue against describing the operation as a quagmire, a label Democrats and some Republicans have started to attach to a conflict Trump had earlier said would last four to six weeks. The exchange highlighted how the war’s political vulnerability is now tied less to battlefield maps than to procurement and replenishment rates: every strike package has a receipt, and every interceptor fired is an inventory problem that has to be solved with new appropriations. Hegseth asked Congress to approve $1.5 trillion in military spending, framing the request as part of a wider contest in which “all adversaries” are spending more of their GDP on defense than the US.

The hearing also showed how discipline is being enforced inside Washington when costs climb. Hegseth said critics of the operation posed a greater threat than Iran itself and accused lawmakers of handing propaganda to enemies, remarks that The Guardian reports were not in his prepared statement. When California Democrat John Garamendi called the war a “political and economic disaster” and said the president was trying to extricate himself from mistakes, Hegseth responded with a loyalty test — “Who are you cheering for here?” — rather than a timeline or an end-state.

Outside the room, protesters chanted “war criminals” at Hegseth and Gen Dan Caine, the chair of the joint chiefs of staff, and The Guardian reported that many members of the public struggled to get admitted. Trump, meanwhile, posted an AI-generated image of himself holding a weapon amid explosions with the caption “NO MORE MR. NICE GUY” and warned Iran to “get smart soon,” the kind of rhetoric that plays well on social media but does not reduce the cost of replacing expended munitions.

The Pentagon’s $25bn estimate is still only a partial ledger, but it is now an official number that has to be defended in public. On Wednesday, it sat on the committee record next to a request for $1.5 trillion more.